A friend purchased some land close to mine and gave up after a few months. In one of my last conversations with him he said “I’ll never try to homestead again.â€
I wanted moving off the grid to be pleasant, enjoyable and successful. When I was young, I could work 25 hours a day. Now, I find I can’t and, in fact, I don’t want to. I want to minimize stress, go at a slow enjoyable pace, do quality work and take time to smell the roses – uh, no roses in the area so make that listen to the breeze.
One of the things that I did to make life easy was install a valve on our motorhome so that I could gravity feed the onboard tank as well as pipe water to the pump. As it was, I could do one or the other but not both at the same time. This meant that if I unhooked the external tank to get load of water then any water used during the time the tank was unhooked came from the onboard tank. When I returned and flipped a valve to refill the onboard tank then I had no water pressure since the system was designed for a pressurized source rather than a gravity fed source. This may seem like a minor inconvenience and it was but, it added a little unnecessary stress to life.
To solve this minor inconvenience, I analyzed the plumbing system and designed a solution. By cutting a water line and installing two valves I was able to refill the onboard tank and have water pressure.
Life is full of stress which must be managed. Some stresses can’t be averted. I try to solve little annoyances and save energy for major problems, for time to listen to the breeze, enjoy the birds, watch the jack rabbits and dream about developing my off-grid paradise as a source of sustainable pleasure.
